Page 57 of Spelunking Through Hell

The sound was immense, the echoes rolling through the badlands and into the rockyStar Trekbluffs ahead of us. The silence that followed was even louder. A few fights were still going, but they were smaller now, multiple guards against single Haspers, and they were done in short order.

Sally strolled toward me, pausing only to kick a few of the corpses before giving me a sharp look. “Do you always showboat like that?”

“Only when it seems appropriate.” I rubbed my elbow, hand coming away sticky with blood. “Ow. I thought Thomas said a show of force would be enough to make these people back down. What happened?”

“Things have gotten a lot more desperate since the last time we clashed with them quite this openly,” said Sally. “We have more resources than they do. They were probably hoping they could overwhelm us fast enough to finish our entire front line.”

She had taken a hit to her shoulder at some point during the fight, and it was already beginning to darken, turning lividly purple and black and spreading tendrils of angered veins down her shoulder and upper arm like some kind of odd growth. Looking at it made me feel like I could sketch a map of her capillaries.

Sally glanced at it, then shrugged. “I bruise easy,” she said, like that was all the explanation I needed. “We won, they didn’t knock us down, now we go home for a clambake and a beer. Or we would if we had either of those things here.”

“Right.” I looked at the field of fallen bodies, past the Haspers to where the guards were gathering up the remains of their own. “And we have to offer to help these people escape when we leave this place?”

“Messengers have already gone out,” said Sally. “Remember? Anyone who’s willing to come peacefully will already know that the offer’s on the table. Anyone who isn’t, we leave behind.”

She grabbed the arm of the nearest Hasper, grunting a little with the effort of dragging it back toward the others. I blinked. “What are you doing?”

“We aren’t the O’Vera; we don’t eat the fallen. But we still have to take what we can from the bodies. It’s time for looting.”

“Oh, goodie,” I said dryly. “My favorite.”

It didn’t take us as long as I would have feared to strip the bodies of everything usable, including the arrows that the guards had pincushioned them with, and my own knives, which I retrieved and wiped meticulously clean before tucking them back into their sheaths and scabbards. Sure, I was covered with blood and ichor, but I don’t rust. Knives do. There was still plenty of time left on both the charm keeping me warm and the one keeping me oxygenated when Sally whistled, waving for the rest of us to follow her back toward the barrier line.

None too soon, if the increasingly labored breathing of some of the guards was anything to go by. There’s only so much you can do with conditioning, and bodies need to breathe. It’s a fact of biology.

Our line was more ragged and less efficient, and not only because some of the guards were carrying the bodies of their fellows. I guess when you’re going up against cannibals, you don’t leave the ones you lose behind. I had a lot of sympathy for that.

No one spoke as we walked, and we’d covered no more than a third of the distance when I saw movement ahead and stopped, waving for the others to do the same. Sally shot me a curious look, then swore as she followed my pointing finger toward the motion on the horizon.

“They’re too small to be Haspers,” she said, voice low. “But most of the other options suck just about as much.”

“Yeah, but Thomas set out the welcome mat, so we may as well at leasttryto approach them like we’re friendly, huh?”

Sally looked at me dubiously. “Nothing here is friendly.”

“So we can be the exception, until they mess with us. And if they do that, well.” I grinned at her. “I have more grenades.”

We kept moving forward as a group, more on edge now, until it became clear that we were approaching a ragged group of mostly women and children, with some teen boys, humanoid in basic form, although their skins were striped like a shaved tabby’s, darker bands of skin atop a pale background, and their hair continued the trend by growing in stripes of silver and deep brown. They could almost have fit right in back in Sally’s hometown, blending into a human population without raising many eyebrows. Their clothes were brown to blend into the landscape, clearly made of something like a rough canvas, and loosely fitted, although that may have been a function of the fact that they didn’t appear to have any actual seams, just knotted ropes.

“Murrays,” said Sally, tone dark. “More of our neighbors.” She waved us to a halt and whistled. The group turned to look at us, shivering. Most of them needed thicker clothing; some didn’t even have shoes. This was not a well-armed and armored militia. Whether we called their leader a warlord or a children’s entertainer, they were clearly starving, and clearly unarmed.

“Neighbors who aren’t trying to kill us right now, so I’ll take it,” I said, and waved, before cupping my hands around my mouth and calling, “Hello, the Murrays! Are you here to fight us, kick off an ambush, or ask for sanctuary?”

Several of them exchanged glances before one, older than many of the others, said timidly, “The last one, I think, if ‘sanctuary’ means the same as ‘shelter.’”

“It does,” I confirmed. The translation spells were working, but that didn’t make them perfect. I pressed one hand flat against my chest. “I’m Alice. This is Sally.”

The woman looked at me, narrow-eyed and anxious, as the others shifted and fidgeted behind her. They were silent, even down to the youngest child. Their cheeks were hollow, their eyes sunken into their faces and too large for the rest of their features. Some carried food and water, of which there was dismayingly little; these people were here because they were out of other options. All but the youngest children stood on their own, the infants and toddlers bundled onto the hips of adults. No one was carrying much, which explained at least a little of Sally’s wariness. This didn’t look like was an exodus.

“Nem,” said the woman, finally. “We come seeking sanctuary.”

“Your messenger came, dropped the sky on our heads, and ran before the Patriarch could order him killed,” said another of the women. “We talked over what he’d said and what we know from our own fields, and we decided that we’d rather take our chances than stay where we were and keep starving to death. We know the undying wizard will probably kill us, but at least it’ll be faster than withering away. Not that we have a choice anymore. If we tried to go back now, the Patriarch would kill us for leaving.”

“Only because you killed three of the Patriarch’s men,” snapped one of the teen boys.

The woman gave him a disdainful look. “They were going to sound the alarm.”

I decided to like her. From the small, satisfied nod Sally gave, she had decided much the same. Raising her voice, she said, “The Autarchwas sincere in his offer of shelter, food, and safety until we can exit this place. No one is going to harm you unless you present a threat.”

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